Samsung/Nexell S5P4418 SoC is being phased out, according to a somewhat recent post by EmbSoM/Graperain stating that the SoC was discontinued by the original manufacturer.
Most people will likely not care about an old quad-core Cortex-A9 SoC being discontinued, but the S5P4418 was found in several interesting hardware platforms we’ve covered here, mostly from FriendlyELEC, previously FriendlyArm. This includes the FriendlyELEC Core4418, NanoPi2 and Fire2A SBCs, Samsung Artik 530 modules, and several others.
Graperain provides more details about the end-of-life notice, notably the key dates for their products:
- Last Time Buy (LTB) – 2026-03-31
- Last Shipment Date – 2026-09-30
This impacts the company’s S5P4418 system-on-module and the S5P4418 single board computer.
The Samsung Artik family has been discontinued for several years, and if I look at the FriendlyELEC store, they only sell the Fire2A and Smart4418 CPU board without an end-of-life notice, but they should probably be subject to a similar phasing out.
Boards designed for the S5P4418 SoC should be compatible with the pin-to-pin compatible S5P6818 octa-core Cortex A53 processor, for which there’s no public end-of-life notice. Graperain also sells those, but they still recommend transitioning to Rockchip RK3562, RK3566, or RK3568 platforms for improved performance and long-term availability.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Considering the number of boards that FriendlyElec created using this processor I was always disappointed that they never upstreamed support to the mainline Linux kernel.
Agreed. No effort was made to even rebase it onto stable kernels in order to benefit from fixes. A user did the effort of porting their outdated 3.4 kernel to 4.4 IIRC and it finally became more stable (I even think FE finally shipped that one). It’s sad because that kernel code base was clean, no blobs, it “just” needed to be upstreamed. This device and the Fire3 could have been so much more successful with a mainline kernel!
Any links to the 4.4 source code? If its clean perhaps it can be forward ported. I’d be much more interested in the S5P6818 though.
For the nanopi M3 (S5P6818):
https://github.com/rafaello7/linux-nanopi-m3-v4.14
What a coincidence! This week-end I stumble upon my Fire2 and was wondering if the 4418 was still “supported”. Now I know 😉